What does it mean to keep going? That question drives “Muddling Through,” a new fabric sculpture exhibition by Spanish Professor Mirzam Cristina Pérez, now open at Public Space One Northside in Iowa City through April 11.
The show takes its name from an Icelandic phrase. “This work was initially intended to be called Þetta Reddast, which in Icelandic means muddling through,” Pérez said. The pieces were made during her artist residency in Iceland in 2025.
Public Space One (PS1) is a non-profit contemporary arts center located in Iowa City and founded in 2002.
Pérez pulled inspiration from time spent in Alaska and Iceland, finding her interactions with people a reframing of a place she thought was quite cold and desolate. “Challenging just to survive, right? And that’s something that keeps coming back to me when I visit these places and especially when I visited Iceland,” she said.
This curiosity pushed her to explore what gives people strength and resilience when facing economic, political and familial hardship.
While traditionally Pérez is a painter, she shifted to thrifted fabric as a medium three years ago after the price of canvas started becoming too expensive. She began with painting on fabric, before evolving into wrapping the material around figures. Pérez found the experience liberating and an escape from the self-imposed boundaries of being a painter. From there, she found a new freedom in creativity and how her work grew without these limits.
As you enter the gallery, you are greeted with large geometric bundles spread along the floor as well as abstract fabric sculptures hung on walls and placed on podiums. There is a large variety of textures within works, including velvet bundles, furs on podiums, tulle and fabric featuring sparkling jewels.
Right next to the entrance, a large bundle wrapped in blue, bejeweled fabric hangs from the ceiling. Behind this large bundle, a small bundle wrapped in gray is propped up leaning against the wall. Both bundles feature various colored fabric spilling from the top and bottom. Directly across is a piece of shiny sequin fabric hung in the shape of a shirt next to a fuzzy triangle featuring more of the same shiny fabric. To the left, several abstract figures sit on podiums, sculpted from a pale, pink fabric.
Further into the gallery, bundles in red and gray are tied into geometric shapes with ropes and fabric, and are placed on the floor along the walls. Hanging from the walls are a collection of photos of various pieces in the exhibition, some posed with people, some placed in space. The pieces themselves also hang near the pictures.
On the furthest wall, a large weaving of fabrics hangs. Titled “Rebirth,” this piece includes a large exploration of textures, including wire, tulle and layers of fabric strips, making the display very layered and three-dimensional.
Pérez enjoys working with blues and greens, but while working on “Rebirth,” she was drawn to the pinks and reds present, thinking about how viewers might respond to her selected colors and textures.
“Oh my God, this is so Barbie,” she said. “This is so Barbie and the literary analyst in me is like going all over the place, right? What are the gender and women’s studies people going to say about this? Oh my God, what are they going to say? What does this mean? What does this mean about me?”
She also commented on the specific fabrics throughout the exhibition, connecting the textures to how she’s changed coming into adulthood, interacting with childhood items like tutus as an adult, even though it was unlike her as a child. “I like texture. I like my materiality. I love that fluffiness, that’s that tutu fabric. It’s just, I can’t even express it,” she said.
When selecting pieces for the gallery, Pérez found it difficult to select for the small space, as she just had so much work she wanted to include, all the way up until install. “I settled on a sample, let’s say.”
Pérez also used the exhibition as an experiment to let the work speak for itself. “I did not put any tags or any titles or any artist statement on the exhibition,” she said. “I wanted the viewer to navigate the space and come to their own terms of what I was trying to do.”
“Muddling Through” is on display at Public Space One Northside until April 11.
